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Tuesday, 28 January 2014

The Burden and Blessing of Being a Jew

There are moments when I
suddenly get a glimpse of how counter-cultural Jewish ritual and synagogue life
actually is. Take the weekly reading from the Torah scroll. Reading that
parchment text, written lovingly by hand according to special rules, is not the
same as reading it from an iPad – handling that scroll reminds me how far away
(emotionally, practically, intellectually) is that ancient world out of which
those Hebrew texts come. The texts have
never changed – but everything else has.

After 2500 years, how is it
possible – is it indeed possible? - that the values of that long-disappeared world
rooted in the agricultural and village life of a small God-fearing Middle
Eastern tribe are connected to us today in the globally inner-connected, urban,
sophisticated (or so we like to think) technologically-driven world we live in,
where religion is just another life-style choice?

Yes, these ancient Hebrew
texts have been foundational in different ways to three great religious
traditions, but when we hear – as we did this week - about laws for damage to
livestock, or damage to crops, or laws about suppressing magic, or laws
relating to the seduction of virgins (Exodus 22 and 23), we know we are reading
about a long-gone world, where how people lived and thought and behaved were,
we imagine, very different from our own.

It’s not that legislation
about animal welfare, or food production, or a fascination with magic and
superstition are not still part of our world – far from it – let alone
emotionally-charged questions around sexuality and the relations between men
and women (just ask Lord Rennard): all of these aspects of life are recognisably
contemporary and still filled with moral and ethical choices, just as they were
in days gone by.

But it still requires an
imaginative leap, or an effort of will, or both, to link the world of then with
the world of now. Then suddenly a verse leaps out at you, transcending time and
space: “You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of a
stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).

We know this comes 36 times
in the Hebrew Bible. It is like a chorus, a repeated refrain in the Biblical
symphony. ‘You shall not oppress a stranger – someone who is different from you
– because you know what it is like from your own history, your own story, your
own collective experience, to be treated badly just because you are different’.
Perhaps the repetition is because it is so difficult to adhere to. And that it
keeps slipping out of sight. Or perhaps
the repetition just reminds us that this is the cornerstone of Judaism, its
belief in justice, in social justice.

But when we stumble across it
in the midst of the oxen and asses and virgins, suddenly all that gap between
Middle Eastern life of three millennia ago and 2014 disappears. Because we
recognise that there is a human reality to suffering, and oppression, and
victimisation, that is universal and timeless.There is something lodged deeply in the human heart, the human psyche, that has always wanted, and still wants,to reject people not like ‘us’ – those who
look different, speak differently, think differently, act differently. As well
as something in the - in some - human hearts that recognises that this isn’t
right, it isn’t just, that we are – or should be, or could be – bigger than
that, betterthan our meaner selves, our
more frightened selves, our more narrow-minded or callous selves.

The Hebrew Bible recognises the
universal nature of this inner battle in the human heart and soul – between our
capacity for empathy and generosity and kindness, and our capacity for
selfishness, and mean-spiritedness, and turning our back on others not like
‘us’. It recognises – it keeps coming back to - this timeless inner human
battle and tries to nudge us towards our better selves, that part of us able to
care for others, that part of us that knows that kindness and generosity might
not always be what we feel, but that kindness and generosity are nevertheless how
we are meant to act if we are to live together – and thrive - in any
society.

We don’t really need a
Holocaust Memorial Day to remind us of the centrality of this message. Germany
in the 1930s is still a cultural memory for Jews, when a whole society became
caught up in the delusional state of mind that believes the exact opposite of
what the Hebrew Bible insists upon. It was a state of mind that considers that
the stranger, the outsider, is a threat, a danger – and whether the so-called
outsider is a Jew, or a Jehovah’s Witness, or a Quaker, or Romany, or mentally
handicapped, or a homosexual, ora
communist – the fascistic mental world that dominatedthe 1930s (and we still hear echoes of it
today – only the ‘other’ might be Romanian or Bulgarian), this mental
worldsays that ‘you’ are not connected
in your humanity to ‘us’, we don’t want you here, we don’t want you living with
us; we cannot tolerate you in your difference so you need to be oppressed, we
need to institute laws that oppress you, discriminate against you, make your
lives intolerable. And in Germany,
eventually, the ‘final solution’ to difference: maybe it’d be better just to
get rid of you completely, kill you off.

So we all know where the
failure to heed the demand ‘You shall not oppress a stranger’ can lead if it
isn’t foundational to how a society organises itself. Today’s secular language
of human rights, of equality and justice, emerged out of this Biblical vision
of how we are to live with each other in society. From those early books of the
Bible onwards, through the prophets of Israel, up to Rabbi Abraham Joshua
Heschel marching arm and arm with his friend and colleague Dr Martin Luther King
in Alabama in the 1960s, this passion for justice has been at the very core of
authentic Jewish faith, Jewish life. Because without this vision, this
ethicaldemand, religion is hollow,
religion is meaningless, religion is hypocritical.

The Taliban’s attack on
Malala Yousafzai is an example ofwhere
religion becomes perverse: when it attacks or oppresses other human beings for
being the wrong gender, or sexual orientation, or belonging to a different
religious tradition, or even a different variety of the same religious
tradition: Sunni and Shi’ite, Protestant and Catholic, Orthodox Jews v Reform Jews.
Religion becomes toxic when it loses touch with its central ethical core, the
concern for someone different from me, and particularly the outsider, the
stranger, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the marginalised, the dispossessed,
the poor, those who can’t keep up with the bustle and pressures of everyday
life.

One of the most heartening
things of the last 12 months has been the emphasis by the new Pope, Francis, on
social justice as the cornerstone of Catholic faith. He’s turned away from
issues about contraception and abortion and what people do in private and has
re-focussed attention on the poor, the deprived, on the need for Christians of
faith to live out in everyday life that bias towards the marginal and the
outsiders that was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching, teachings which show just
how faithful Jesus was to his Jewishness, just how rooted he was in the essence
of the faith of the Hebrew Bible.

The election of Francis last
year coincided with the election of ex-oil industry insider Justin Welby as the
new Archbishop of Canterbury, who has brought a breath of fresh air into the
Church of England with his critique of payday lenders such as Wonga; and his questioning
of the power of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank: “It comes
back to human flourishing and human fallibility. We need to recognise the
latter, and design our institutions to contain it in order to ensure the
former...The fallibility of human beings and thus of human institutions is a
necessary part of understanding any governance structure and any centre of
power. Power has to be constrained.”

Judaism has absolutely no
monopoly on the ethical demand that social justice should be at the heart of
any society that wants to flourish, that wants to create the greatest sense of
wellbeing for the greatest numbers.That
ancient vision has been taken on, and taken over, by all sorts of other religions
and secular philosophies. But Judaism, the wellspring of that vision, needs to re-find
its voice, and its spokesmen and spokeswomen. One of the sad things I found
about the last Chief Rabbi was that in spite of his intellectual brilliance as
a presenter of Judaism – a special ability to show to Jews and the wider public
something of the richness and glory of Jewish faith, Jewish culture, Jewish
civilisation - he never really spoke out on the ethical and moralissues of the day. He had nothing to say on
poverty and homelessness, nothing to say about the moral scandal of living in a
society which is one of the most unequal in the western world, nothing to say
about the economic assaults on the disadvantaged that have been going on these
last few years.

Speaking from out of the
beating heart of the Biblical and rabbinic tradition, he could have addressed
from a religious perspective the class war that we are enduring, masterminded by
the privileged, where the gap between rich and poor is growing ever larger.

Isn’t this the job of
religious leaders – to offer an alternative moral vision to the dominant
political ethos of the day, when that ethos contradicts the essential religious
vision of the dignity and worth of each human being? But his failure is
symptomatic of what the cultural critic Stefan Collini has described as ‘a
wider unease at the very idea ofan
unembarrassed appeal to non-economic human values in public debate.’ But
without that appeal to other values we all become bystandersto ‘the wanton mutilation of our
life-sustaining social fabric by those who act as though balance sheets end all
arguments.’ (Times Literary Supplement, January 17th)

The religious work of enactingthe moral vision, the Biblical vision, of how
people should treat each other – with dignity and a radical concern for their
individual well-being - is ethics in action. It is practical tzedakah – not ‘charity’, as it is often
translated, but ‘righteousness’, right action:doing the right thing, not the convenient thing. ‘Righteousness’ is a
demand, , and it is easy to duck out of, or rationalise as not making a
difference. But righteousness always makes a difference. Although we know how
hard it is to be true to it.

It is always easier to look
away, in large things and small things. Whether it is the ongoing agony of
Syria, or the victimization of Palestinians or – closer to home – the attacks
on the welfare state, or the demonization of the so-called ‘feckless’ poor or
immigrants, all societies can let their better ethical and moral vision of
human dignity go into eclipse. It happens slowly, slowly, until you realise
it’s disappeared and your whole society has lost its ethical core. Though
sometimes it happens in the blink of an eye, with one click on a computer
keyboard, or with the stroke of a pen signing off on some further piece of
life-sapping legislation by a politician or bureaucrat.

Reading from the Torah scroll
keeps our eyes open, and our hearts from hardening. Reading from the Torah
scroll, we strengthen each other in keeping that ancient vision alive. Reading
from the Torah scroll, we are reminded what it means to carry this strange
burden – and blessing – of being a Jew.

[loosely based on a
sermon given at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 25th 2014]